A Whole List of Recent Political Pet Peeves Which Make Me Scream When I Hear Them
1. The "failed" troop withdrawal from Afghanistan was Biden's fault.
Don't watch Meet the Press, Sunday edition, I keep telling myself. It will make your blood boil. Inevitably, one of Chuck Todd's remarks or one of his guests will make me angry and I'll yell at the television, which does no good, get upset and ruin my Sunday. But I did it again this week.
I'm not even going to acknowledge who the guest was that upset me, except to say it was a white, Republican woman who only seemed capable of spouting talking points and who could not intelligently carry on a real conversation. I have to admit, Todd did actually ask a couple of direct questions that would make a Republican squirm and this woman managed to skillfully evade, change the topic and get her anti-Biden digs in her statement. I hadn't been paying much attention when I heard her make a statement about the "failed withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan," blaming that on Biden.
Have you ever heard of a thing called the "Doha Agreement?" This disaster was negotiated by Trump, not Biden, ignoring the Afghan government and by extension, the army, negotiating directly with the Taliban and giving them the kind of recognition they needed to get the support for mounting an invasion to re-take what the US spend trillions of dollars trying to set free. Par for the course, since Trump always prefers murdering dictators over democratically elected leadership. All that did was send a signal which undermined the government, communicating to its military that it was about to be abandoned to its "enemies" and set the stage for the collapse of the Afghan Army. Trump's refusal to participate in the peaceful transfer of power with the incoming Biden administration left the latter without a clear picture of the whole situation.
The Biden administration managed to evacuate over 100,000 people in a few days. I have no doubt that the incompetent Trump administration would have to consider itself lucky to have gotten a few hundred people out. They wouldn't have tried for many more beyond just the Americans who were still there.
So call it a failure, but blame it on Trump, not Biden. Biden got it done. Trump failed miserably.
2. Any effort at racial reconciliation or social justice reform is "CRT".
Injustice that results from racial bigotry and prejudice is a very real problem. Creating an awareness of it and providing resources and actions aimed at resolving it goes well beyond the parameters of Critical Race Theory, which is just one among many attempts at explaining and resolving racism. But most conservatives lump all social justice and racial reconciliation efforts into their definition of CRT, creating a "straw man" argument against something that does not exist. It would be difficult to be completely informed about issues of racial and ethnic injustice without a good look at all of the associated sociological theories available to try and explain it, but using all or part of a social theory as a means of understanding the bigger problem of injustice associated with race does not equal acceptance or endorsement of CRT.
Critical Race Theory is just that, a sociological theory which has emerged from within a segment of the population which struggled to have the same kind of liberty as those around them had because of circumstances due to racial prejudice, social inequality and economic disadvantage caused by slavery and the problems and issues that resulted from the failed attempt to assimilate five million former slaves into the culture. It's one of many sociological theories in a marketplace of ideas, based on observation and open to the influence of other theories and ideas.
Most of those on the extreme right who dismiss CRT outright are largely ignorant of what they are dismissing. Their criticisms are based on false assumptions, misinterpretations and on their own bigotry, perpetuated by ignorance, which still runs deep in this country when it comes to racial equality. What racial "equality" means to many white conservatives is that "they", meaning African Americans, must adopt white culture in order to assimilate, and if they act and behave accordingly, then problems like racial profiling and unequal treatment by the police and the justice system, poverty and lack of economic opportunity and higher unemployment, will somehow just go away.
Overcoming bigotry requires getting well beyond yourself into the culture at large, making oneself uncomfortable while opening up the mind to understanding. It requires education and understanding, which theories like CRT provide, because their origins come from decades of oppression and persecution of the ethnic or racial group that develops it.
White Supremacy and a sociological "theory" called White Christian Nationalism are also out there in the marketplace of ideas, and have made significant inroads into the white, Evangelical churches on the coattails of its marriage to right wing politics. I would suggest that neither of these theories are consistent with Biblical theology, in the same way that critics of CRT claim that it is not consistent. They are theories based on a fascist, racist perspective that is anti-Christian, at least according to what the Apostle Paul wrote to the Colossian church about race and ethnic identity:
In that renewal (conversion/salvation in Jesus Christ) there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all. Colossians 3:11, NRSV
Churches that believe the Bible is inerrant and infallible should be integrated and color blind.
3. The 2020 election results in many states need to be audited and re-counted because they do not accurately reflect the will of the voter.
Do these people making these claims realize how monumentally ignorant they are? To achieve the kind of "massive voter fraud" it would have taken to actually change the outcome of votes in any of the states that were challenged would have required one of the most duplicitous, outrageous conspiracies ever devised. Republicans, many of them Trumpies, were in charge of the voting and counting process in almost all of the states where grumbling and griping about the vote was a problem. These people would have to be either the most naive, unobservant, inattentive people in the world, or they must have had their bribery price met.
Even the heavily biased pro-Trump groups that formed and claimed to be "auditors" hired by state legislators couldn't find enough evidence on which to build a made-up case. I thought for sure that, in spite of the fact that they essentially had to ask for help from everything to determining how to use a vote-counting machine to figuring out the county voter registration data base, the Cyber Ninjas who spent $6 million of Trump campaign contributor money in Arizona would submit a report claiming massive voter fraud, whether they found any or not. I would have loved to have been in the room when, after they finally figured out what they were doing, they saw that the votes had been accurately counted, all votes accurately vetted and accounted for, and one of the cleanest election counts in Arizona history.
It got so much attention, and focused so much attention on the state legislators who pushed for it, that after their muted results were finally released, which, in a bunch of convoluted language, conceded that Maricopa County had accurately recorded the votes and that there was no voter fraud, that it put the senate president who pushed it into weeks of silence on just about anything.
And here's an update on the Cyber Ninjas, who lied through their teeth when they told the Arizona Senate the cost would be $150,000, but spent over $8 million on their botched failure, and are now declaring bankruptcy. Apparently they were not about election honesty, they were about grabbing the bucks while they could. They have still not complied with a standing judicial order, and in the process of completely botching what was not an audit, but an attempt to convince mindless, ignorant people that there was election fraud, even though they found absolutely nothing. The whole group should be in jail, along with Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, who pushed for it, and the state senators who voted for it.
Arizona Partisan "Audit" Group Declares Bankruptcy
In Georgia, the claims of the "big lie" turned out to be a disaster all the way around for Republicans. Attacks and accusations against two election workers, Wandrea Moss and Ruby Freeman, turned into death threats and intimidation. The accusations against them, pushed by the insane, demented Rudy Giuliani, turned out to be provably false and made the Trump campaign look like the lying, racist thugs that they are, completely undermining the claim of massive voter fraud and leading to the confirmation, by audit, of the accuracy of the vote counts in Fulton County. The Senate runoff two months later did the same.
Anyone who still believes the "big lie" is an idiot. Trump supporters are the election stealers, and the insurrectionists, not Democrats.
4. The Mexican border is a disaster.
What "disaster" means in conservative language is that they are actually considering allowing people into the United States for political asylum. Imagine that. People wanting to come to America to escape persecution and political turmoil in their home country. Who gave them that idea?
Local newspapers and news media in the southern part of Arizona and New Mexico along the border in that part of the country are fanning the flames. They are digging up and reporting every instance of an "illegal sighting" anywhere. The numbers are about the same as they were during the Trump administration, more than they were during the Obama administration when the Border Patrol had the money to fix their surveillance equipment and boost their personnel numbers, less than they were under Bush. But now, what your local newspaper would never bother to print, you'll find in there just about every day.
There's a local daily newspaper in Sierra Vista, Arizona, called the Herald Review, which has a new section marked "Border." It contains a few stories entered on the website in chronological order which, in spite of some sensationalist language, actually show how routine and how small the problem really is. You have to get past a paywall to read most of it, unfortunately, but the few stories that are there don't support the conservative political hysteria about "the border." Maybe that's their point.
There is a "wall" along the border between El Paso, Texas and Nogales, Arizona, in the vicinity of the border crossings. But once out in the open country, it becomes a double barbed wire fence, and some kind of bumpers designed to keep vehicles from crossing. There's really not a lot of wide open country in that area, there are several small towns with border crossings and there are ranches and small communities scattered around. Most of the ranchers have regular crossers who do seasonal work for them and then go back across.
I was in a border community back in December, expecting the whole town to be over-run by people from across the border. There were no real signs of any "disaster." There was a processing facility about a mile outside of town, where, according to local reports, there were over 1,200 people waiting to be processed. Most of the people who were visiting the customs station were being housed in Mexico. When I crossed the border, I did see a line outside the customs office on the US side of the border, maybe a hundred people or more. No one was actually coming into the United States.
Most of these people are fleeing some sort of political or criminal oppression in their home countries, mainly warring drug cartels or oppressive dictatorships. What in the world made them decide to come to the United States as a refuge from oppression? Where in the world could they have come up with that idea? America, welcoming the tired, poor huddled masses yearning to be free. Where did they hear that rumor?
A Political Rut of Talking Points and Scare Tactics
There are some Democrats who still believe in the art of political debate, reasoning, compromise and negotiation. One of the reasons I minored in English in college was to sharpen my communication skills in order to engage in productive dialogue and debate. And I picked up this commitment to the value of integrity as part of my Christian upbringing. I'm very well aware of the effects and consequences of being dishonest, having learned from experience and lack of perfection. I have a need to be aware of what's happening around me and how it affects what I do.
We're falling short, as a society and as a nation, in providing our citizens with critical thinking skills. The political fallout is clear evidence of this failure. I don't know whether technology that provides us with mindless entertainment and which is a major overload of information, is part of the problem or part of the solution but I don't understand how someone with intelligence and free will can go through life not paying attention to what's going on around them. I won't be manipulated, as long as I can read, hear, write and think. Unfortunately, that is becoming a disadvantage.
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